Count Melchior de Vogue. Le Temple de Jerusalem. Monographie du Haram-ech-Chérif suivi d’un Essai sur la Topographie de la Ville Sainte.

(ISRAEL, LAND OF).

Noblet & Baudry

Paris

1864

FIRST EDITION. With 37 plates of which 11 are hand-colored and 3 are double-page.

Tobler, p. 187.

Charles-Jean Melchior, Marquis de Vogüé (1829–1916) was a French aristocrat, groomed for a diplomatic career under the restored Bourbon monarchy. After his father, Léonce Louis Melchior de Vogüé, was arrested during the coup of 1851 which brought Louis Napoleon III to power in France, Charles-Jean Melchior had to set aside diplomacy and instead he focused on studying the history and archaeology of the Holy Land, where he spent 1853 and 1854. In Jerusalem he sought to study the ruins of Solomon’s Temple on the site of the mosques of Omar and El Aqsa, until a short time previously closed to non-Muslims. In 1871, after the fall of the Second Empire, the new President of France, Adolphe Thiers, appointed Marquis de Vogüé France’s ambassador in Constantinople, and from 1875 to 1879 he was ambassador in Vienna. See http://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/melchior-de-vogue.